FAMILY TIES

Czechoslovakia Spied on Trump in the ’80s to Get U.S. Political Intel

Ivana’s Czech father reportedly gave regular updates to intelligence officials.

The communist government intelligence service in the former Czechoslovakia focused a spying campaign on Donald Trump in the late 1980s in an attempt to gain intel on the “upper echelons of the U.S. government,” The Guardian reports. His first wife Ivana’s Czechoslovakian father, Miloš Zelníček, reportedly gave regular updates to intelligence officers about Trump’s career in New York and his political maneuvering. While the agency kept tabs on Trump from his marriage to Ivana in 1977, records show interest in Trump grew after George H.W. Bush won the 1988 presidential election. A former Czech intelligence official, Vlastimil Daněk, told The Guardian: “Trump was of course a very interesting person for us. He was a businessman, he had a lot of contacts, even in U.S. politics. We were focusing on him, we knew he was influential. We had information that he wanted to be president in future.”

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